In the late 1990s, Eric Rudolph — raised Catholic and affiliated for a time with a Christian Identity sect — bombed abortion clinics and a gay bar, insisting they were venues of immorality and evil. Last July, an Orthodox Jewish Israeli attacked the marchers in the Jerusalem LGBT pride parade, stabbing six of them, and one of them, a teenager, died of her wounds; justifying his attacks by appealing to Talmudic punishments for homosexuality, he had just been released from a 10-year prison term for doing the same in 2005. Yesterday, a Christian pastor from Arizona, Steven Anderson, praised the slaughter of 49 people in an Orlando LGBT club on the ground that “homosexuals are a bunch of disgusting perverts” and are “pedophiles.”

Similarly, U.S. Muslims are more likely to support same-sex marriage (42 percent support it) than are U.S. evangelicals (28 percent), historically black Protestants (40 percent), Mormons (26 percent) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (14 percent). Indeed, U.S. Muslims are roughly just as likely to support same-sex marriage as Christians generally (44 percent).

None of this is to deny in the slightest that deeply anti-LGBT attitudes are pervasive in parts of the Muslim world: In most countries (though not all) acceptance is in the single digits. But that’s also true of equally poor parts of the Christian world, where only tiny parts of the population of largely Christian countries such as Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya believe society should accept homosexuality. In other countries that are not predominantly Muslim — China, Russia, Nigeria, El Salvador, Israel — pluralities similarly oppose the societal acceptance of homosexuality.

It’s also true that parts of Islamic doctrine contain all sorts of horrible views on LGBTs, women, and other issues. But exactly the same is true of both the Christian Bible and Jewish Talmud. When it comes to Jews and Christians, people instinctively understand how bigoted and deceitful it is to cherry-pick particularly offensive excerpts from their holy books and use them to demonize all contemporary Christians and Jews.

Indeed, a standard tactic of neo-Nazis and other various anti-Semites is to cite ugly excerpts from the Talmud — including ones purportedly endorsing Jews holding non-Jews as slaves or lying to and stealing from non-Jews — as evidence of the dishonesty and untrustworthiness of Jews generally. We all understand that this tactic is so vile, unscholarly, and anti-intellectual precisely because modern adherents to those religions interpret and apply (or ignore) those provisions in all sorts of ways.

The opportunity to exploit LGBT suffering to fuel the standard anti-Muslim agenda was far too attractive to resist, no matter how many facts negate it. Try to tell LGBT citizens who grew up in North America, or South America, or Europe, that anti-gay hatred is an exclusive attribute of Islam and the scorn you’ll provoke — grounded in actual personal experience rather than hateful ideology — will be intense.

Depicting anti-LGBT hatred as the exclusive (or even predominant) province of Islam is not only defamatory toward Muslims but does a massive disservice to the millions of LGBTs who have been — and continue to be — seriously oppressed, targeted, and attacked by people who have nothing to do with Islam. The struggle of LGBTs around the world is difficult enough without having them cynically used as some sort of prop to bash a group that itself is already being bashed from multiple directions.